Asus U1F: 11.1″ Ultra Portable Notebook with LED

Asus’ U1F is a 11.1″ wide ultra-portable notebook PC that sports a LED backlight to reduce the thickness of the LCD to just 5mm. The entire U1F thickness is just 18mm or 0.7″ and has the thickest part at 1.1″. The U1F has an Intel Core Duo U2400 CPU with an integrated Intel 945GM Express chipset and an Intel a/b/g WiFi. Hard drives come in 40 or 80GB. Ther e is also an integrated VGA (640 x 480) webcam. Connectivity optioins includes gigabit Ethernet, Bluetooth 2.0 with EDR and A2DP. With a magnesium, aluminum and carbon fiber body and a 3-cell battery, the U1F weighs just 2.2 lbs.

LED backlights will be featured more prominently in notebook PCs coming to a store near you in 2007. One of the main benefits to LEDs compared to CCFLs is power consumption. LED sips less power than CCFLs but only at brightness that typical notebook PCs require when on battery power. That brightness level is just around 100 cd/m2 and sometimes lower. Since LEDs are solid-state the durability enhancement is also added, but without any improvements on the glass itself in the LCD, the overall LCD will have about the same durability as a CCFL-based LCD. Though some might state that colors are improved, unfortunately that is not the case. The reason for the non-improvement is because of the type of LEDs used in notebook PC applications. The LED is composed of a blue LED chip and a yellow phosphor coated package. With this combination, white light is created. But color gamut is not enhanced. Actually, without redeveloping color filters to match the light wavelengths corresponding to red, green and blue that the LEDs generate, the color gamut is slightly worse.